My international relations course (2)
As explained last week, I’ve just started a course at the City Lit in central London. The course – which will run for an evening each week for 12 weeks – is entitled “International Relations And World Conflict” and our lecturer is an American called Dr Dale Mineshima-Lowe.
Session two this evening was quite heavy because we were introduced to the notion of theories of international relations and the lecturer outlined four of these:
1) Rationalism – states are assumed to act rationally in pursuit of their interests, assessing costs against benefits, and acting to maximise advantage and minimise losses
2) Realism – states prioritise national interests and security over ideology and generally distrust long-term co-operation or alliances [more information here]
3) Liberalism – the prime determinant of state behaviour is assumed to be preferences rather than capabilities and interactions between states can be economic as well as political [more information here]
4) Constructivism – this theory is based on the idea that human association is determined primarily by shared ideas rather than material forces [more information here]
There’s a discussion of international relations theory on Wikipedia here.